Chapter 17: The Butter Knife

My mother did not answer Melody.

She stood up from the table, took a butter knife from beside her bread plate, and said, "Lucy, come upstairs."

"Colleen," my stepfather said.

"Please," my mother said to him. "Let me do this one by myself."

He nodded once, and she walked out with the butter knife in her hand.

I followed, because I wanted to see what she would do with it.

She stopped in front of the guest room door.

From her blouse pocket she took the key I had handed her in the auditorium on Friday.

She had carried it for two days.

"I didn't know what to say yet," my mother said. "So I kept it."

She put the key in the lock and turned it twice.

Then she knelt on the carpet in her pressed blouse and began unscrewing the lock plate from the door with the butter knife.

The first screw came out.

The second one stripped.

"Do you want me to get Gus?" I said. "He has a drawer of tools. It's marked Miscellaneous."

"No."

"Do you want to hold the knife the other way?"

"I want to take this off your door."

The third screw went flying and rolled under the bed, and my mother said a word I had never heard her say, and I laughed.

She laughed too, a short, cracked laugh with no air in it.

Then she sat back on her heels and stopped.

"When you were five," my mother said, "I took you to a speed-dating night in Westlake Park."

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